I arrived late due to some home duties I couldn’t get away from, but just in time for a proper listening session to Tom Browne’s “Sunrise” digital phono project. A superb achievement so far. Jon’s setup is pleasant as fantastic is to see him re-routing cables as his system were a maze (which I personally think it is!). I had a great time listening to different setups of RIAA stages, step up transformers, ADC/DACs and the joy of music and friends.
Better to read (un-biased?) opinions from other members of the group:
Tom Browne’s comments:
“I would like to offer my thanks to Jon for an excellent meet-up… it was good to meet up with folk, and it really doesn’t seem like almost 5 years since the original Discrete DAC demo, and it sounds like it has encouraged a few more folk to get building, which is always a good thing. 🙂
The course of things rarely seems to run smooth… as I think a lot of folk are aware, the iteration of Sunrise that I brought was very much a prototype… it has probably been six months plus since it had any vinyl through it at all, and that was just testing the front end into the Lynx A/D stage, which is full of slow opamps and filtering… very different!
It took a lot of late nights to get it to this point, but I think in the end we heard some good stuff from it, and indeed from all the Starlight DACs and vinyl that we had a chance to listen to. Thanks again to George for a listen to his fantastic vinyl, and for injecting some musical variety.
A few of my own personal subjective impressions, which will obviously be biased…
Jon’s 1:20 step up transformer is fantastic… in terms of top to bottom bandwidth and low distortion I think it’s one heck of a reference. Such a shame it wouldn’t play nice with my front end. I think it just goes to show there is such a thing as “too much” bandwidth with some combinations. I have no idea what the bandwidth is of Sunrise’s cascoded MM stage but it should be flat to way over 100kHz, perhaps much more.
I really enjoyed Geoff’s phono stage… you could argue that it was slightly “harder” than Jon’s, but for me there were considerably more dynamics (benefit of the very low impedance battery supply?) and considerably more extended top end so enjoyed it more… Geoff’s was clearly flat to well beyond 20K, to my ears… Jon’s sounded like it started to droop at 14-15K or so and I missed the sparkle that the Lyra is well capable of giving.
It made me think that a 1:10 TX, then a highly degenerated low noise JFET (say, only x10) followed by a 2SK79 SIT to give the rest of the gain would be pretty fabulous. I think if you low passed the output from Geoff’s, this would probably give a very similar overall effect… it’s hard to get around the fact that a JFET when running in this mode has a limited linearity sweet spot, but you can get virtually nil distortion if you don’t need buckets of gain.
I will have to have a think about if I can feasibly get more gain without having to compromise in this area, as I’d tuned the MM stage for the lowest feasible distortion, which did mean less gain (you can get a shedload more with cap bypass but distortion is much higher)… I think we were well under -20dBFS for a lot of vinyl playback, which is not optimum for the A/D converter.
Hmm. It’s a tricky one. More gain or less distortion…
The possibilities for Sunrise are considerable, but there’s a lot of development still ahead – the software is barely started, and there will be a lot of flexibility in what you will be able to do… different EQ curves, click/pop reduction, etc. The main thing though is to make sure the sound quality is first rate so people love to listen to the music.
Coming back to Starlight, I think the new Vishay DAC boards worked quite well, and it was good to hear the other DAC variations, as well as Richard’s DAC8830.
It doesn’t seem that we got much time to look at Starlight issues, but folk can always get in touch if they’re having specific issues.
I think I now need a bit of a rest to gain some more energy. 🙂
Best Regards,
Tom.”
George’s comments:
“Thanks to Jon for hosting another informative day and to all who contributed
versions of Starlight and other projects especially Jonathan who brought a
superb dac and gave me a lift there.Tom’s Sunrise was a revelation: I did not believe a digital phono stage
could sound so natural and it constantly brought out new detail on very
familiar material. To my ears it combined the clarity of very good high res
digital with the ease and richness of vinyl. On John Martyn’s “Solid Air”
the double bass was tangible and you could hear the resonance of the wood as
if in a club. I got massive amounts of previously unheard detail and a deep
soundstage to the Pointer sisters singing a capella background to Taj
Mahal – a recording I’ve played hundreds of times.Previn’s digitally recorded version of Prokofiev’s “Cinderella” ( a
recording on vinyl I would normally have turned up my noise at in favour of
an analogue version) turned into an amazingly realistic experience. You
could hear each musician in a symphony orchestra playing together as
individuals each contributing to the overall sound. On a half way good
system you can distinguish the different brass instruments and the woodwinds
when they play in unison, but this was the first time I have ever heard and
been able to separate out the individual violinists playing in unison. It
was the closest I have ever heard to a live orchestra.Congratulations Tom and when can I get one?
Best to all
George”
Jonathan’s comments:
“… It was a really interesting session listening to the various things there. Tom’s Sunrise was a revelation, my brain was processing a sound which I had not heard before, which combined the detail and “stability” of digital, with the lovely organic quality that only comes from playing vinyl on a good set-up. It was good to hear a couple of pieces of music that I know very well, and like George I heard details that I hadn’t before, but in a very musical “whole”. It would be a crying shame if Sunrise doesn’t make it into production. I myself would be on the list for one!
In terms of Starlight it was good to hear various items. And for me for the first time, I could hear the differences between the single and dual discrete DAC’s. I really liked the sound that Richard’s valve stages bring to the DAC, a richness and ease of sound that was missing from the single version. For me I felt that was some loss of detail though. However, I did feel that the dual version offered the best of both worlds, the detail was there, but with the richness that the valve stage brings too. I’ve heard this again since I’ve got mine running for the first time at home. It’s still not set up optimally yet either, but it’s certainly better now the caps were removed from the one we played on Saturday. It’s great to have those new PCS’s that Tom has designed. I do think they make the DAC much easier to make with the SMRD’s, giving a more consistent result.
Mention should be made about Jon’s system. It’s still sounding superb and provides a really believable sound. And I think we could see its quite robust too, with some quite dramatic pyrotechnics a few times during the day, seemingly all taken within its stride!..”
